Jul 5, 2015

“The Bernie Sanders Smear Has Begun” wrote
Matthew Pulver in “Salon”(1). Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, a
self-styled “centrist” and long time Hillary supporter, appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning
Joe” complaining that Sanders is too extreme to win a Presidential
Election.

Clinton indeed has every reason to
worry.Bernie is drawing huge crowds at
nearly every campaign stop.In New
Hampshire, the Manchester Union Leader
reported on June 6th thatover
1,000 people jammed themselves into a recreational center in the town of Keene
to hear Bernie speak.(2) On July 2, over
10,000 people packed into an auditorium in Madison Wisconsin; a crowd so large
that it was ‘standing room only’ with more than an additional thousand
estimated to have stood outside the hall to hear the speech. (3) He is drawing
crowds that, at times dwarf any other candidate on either side of the political
fence.

The self-styled unabashed ‘Democratic
Socialist” has a message that is resonating through the beleaguered middle
class.An early ‘straw poll’ taken at
the Wisconsin Democratic Party convention in Milwaukee had Sanders within 9
points of Hillary, polling in at 41% among the party regulars to Clinton’s 49%.
(4) And, by the middle of June he had closed within 12 points of Hillary in
neighboring New Hampshire. (5) Whether
or not he can garner the resources to mount a full-fledged 50 state campaign
remains to be seen, but clearly many self-styled ‘progressives’ are in search
of a viable alternative to Wall Street’s favorite Democrat.

Sanders, has served for years as an Independent
in the Congress.His presidential
campaign is nothing less than a full fledged insurgency against the staid old ‘mossbacks’
who have run the party for nearly a quarter century; the Clintonites with their
‘centrist’ agenda that has served only the interests of the investor class.His message is a ‘progressive’ one,
calling for raising taxes on the upper echelons to 90%; rates not seen since
the Eisenhower administration. He stresses the need to break up and re-regulate
the banks, to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall act, to enforce anti-trust
laws.He has led the fight against the
looming trade agreements currently being pushed by the Obama White House in
conjunction with Republicans in Congress.He calls for the rigorous enforcement of environmental laws and the
funding of renewable energy.He wants to
make education free for every student, and the raising of the minimum
wage.He advocates for the organization
of the workforce into unions to ensure occupational safety and a fair return
for a day’s labor.He wants to rebuild
the infrastructure, roads, bridges, rail lines, high speed internet, to create
jobs and make the country more competitive.It is a broad and encompassing agenda boldly calling for a return to the
‘golden era’ of postwar American pre-eminence, or as much of it as we can recapture
in today’s world economy.The Clinton campaign will ignore this
challenge at its peril, for his message rings through the country
like a tuning fork hit with a sledge hammer.His appeal runs the spectrum from Progressives in the New Deal tradition
and old Wallace and Reagan Democrats wanting a slice of the 'American Pie' to independents and tea baggers angry at the 'Eastern Establishment", the bailout of the bankers, and anxious to reign in Wall Street. He's even getting a measure of Republican support for positions he's taken. For instance, according
to a recent CBS/New York Times Poll 80% of Republicans agree with Bernie that
there is too much money in politics, over 70% of Republicans think that there
should be limits to what individuals or the burgeoning Political Action Committees
can be allowed to spend.Indeed 81% of Republicans felt that the campaign
finance system needed fundamental changes (45%) or a complete rebuild (36%).
(6)Sanders, if he can gather the
resources to build an organization and purchase enough media to broadcast his
message, now threaten to assault the citadel and capture the heart of the
Democratic Party. It is a tall order but he, if anyone, is uniquely positioned
to make the attempt.

Accordingly
the attacks have begun.McCaskill is but
the first, but certainly not the last to take the field in effort to defend the
‘once and future Queen”.Employing the
tactics of Karl Rove, McCaskill went about the business of turning a sign of
success into a liability by acknowledging, then denigrating the size of crowds
drawn to his campaign.“Well, you know
Rand Paul’s father got massive crowds, Ron Paul,” she said. “He got the same
size crowds, Pat Buchanan got massive crowds. It’s not unusual for someone who has an extreme message to have a
following” (7) she concluded.

“Ooooh,
gotcha:” wrote Matthew Pulver in “Salon”
“Big crowds mean you’re an extremist. So the fewer people you have the more
reasonable you are.” (7) By this standard Rick Santorum, who recently held a
campaign event at which an audience of just one person emerged would, by this
logic, be the most reasonable man in the field.

Pulver
went on to behold that Sander’s domestic platform is hardly extreme, or even
radical. His campaign’s “bread and butter” is “mostly a return to mid-century,
postwar policies, infused with social democratic ideas from places like Sweden,
where social democrats gained a majority in parliament 75 years ago.”Sweden, so terrifyingly extreme that it has
become the home of: “Volvo, Ikea, Spotify, Saab, H&M, Skype, Ericsson,
AstraZenaca, and many more”. (7) Sanders, observed Pulver is hardly ‘extreme’
in the fashion of Ron Paul or Buchanan, citing Paul’s extreme libertarianism
and calls to outright abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and
Buchanan’s Christian White-Nationalist race baiting.

Sanders
can only appear ‘extreme’ in the context of the degree to which the Democratic
Party, led by the Clintons, has wandered to the political ‘right’.

“We have no way of knowing”, writes Pulver, “whether
or not the Clinton team signed off on this means of attack, if this
Sanders-as-extremist line will be something returned to as his success
continues.If so, it will be hard for
some to hear from the political family most responsible for making Sanders
fairly standard postwar liberalism an extreme position.Bill Clinton helmed the rightward turn of the
party in 1992, and now Hillary can call anyone who didn’t follow Bill’s lead ‘extremist’
It compounds the already problematic
dynastic dimension of Clinton’s campaign.The Clintons, preparing for the coronation, also get to police what is
acceptable in the party with Hillary the enforcer of the law Bill laid
down?Continuing to call Sanders an ‘extremist’
might only convince many Democrats that the Clintons consider the party theirs.”
(7)

It is
more than that.Clinton must know that
the insurgency is not a flash-in-the-pan; but she cannot confront the challenge
head on. The devil, as they say, is in the details. By speaking in the tradition of the Party’s
history, Sanders is claiming the mantle of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ and for
Hillary to openly confront Sanders by drawing distinctions between them only
serves to demonstrate the gap between her professed ‘progressive’ politics and the
‘real deal’.She will pale by
comparison. By forcing Hillary to take the mantle from him, Sanders threatens
to lay bare the shortcomings of Hillary’s progressivism and demonstrate that
here stands no FDR or Truman or JFK.The
attacks come instead from surrogates, she will attempt to stay above the fray, opting
out for generalities, talking the talk but unwilling, and unable, to take the
first step in the walk.

Hillary
recently gave a major policy speech on the economy.Economist Robert Reich gave her excellent
grades on recognizing the problems, but failing grades on her remedies.She, like her husband before her, will rail
against Wall Street, and speak using the terminology of progress and reform,
but will not utter a single word in terms of specifics toward remedy. To do so threaten
not only the financial underpinnings of her campaign but require the outright
repudiation of her husband’s legacy. As
with the pending trade agreements she comes out opposed to ‘fast-track’
authority, not when she could have used her voice in the arena to help shape
public opinion but at the very moments the Congress was moving to enact it,
when weighing in on the question would be seen by her Wall Street supporters as
having negligible influence.Significantly, she did not at the same time speak in opposition to the
TPP and other trade agreements, but remained silent. It is this reticence, this
unwillingness to champion an issue or a cause, this unwillingness to fight to
redress grievance that has characterized the Clintons from the beginning.Though they talk like the Roosevelt’s they
act like the Hoovers and this is what has drawn Bernie Sanders into the arena,
and this is what he threatens to expose.

Jun 29, 2015

“Michigan is winning the ‘race to the bottom’,
rapidly transforming itself into the Mississippi of the Midwest”.

-----from
the “Quotations of Chairman Joe”

As noted in
a previous post (1), according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, median household income in my old home state
of Michigan fell by $13,278.00 between 2000 and 2013.According to the report a truly ‘staggering
drop”. The rot runs deep permeating the
old industrial heartland and now threatening the entire nation.

In an essay
entitled “Michigan: A Magical
Mystery Tour of American Austerity Politics”, first appearing on the website TomDispatch and
republished by Bill Moyers on the website “Moyers
and Company”, Laura
Gottesdiener and Eduardo García take us on a “Magical” or, more appropriately “Tragical”
tour of my beloved Michigan revealing what has befallen the great State under
nearly three decades of ‘benign neglect’.The following is the article as it appeared in almost its entirety:

“Something
is rotten in the state of Michigan.

One city
neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with
cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced
it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management
company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit.
Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single,
state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager
law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor.
This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but
gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including
dissolving the city itself — all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of
“fiscal responsibility.”

If
you’re thinking, “Who cares?” since what happens in Michigan stays in Michigan,
think again. The state’s aggressive balance-the-books style of governance has
already spread beyond its borders. In January, New Jersey Governor Chris
Christie appointed bankruptcy lawyer and former Detroit emergency manager Kevyn
Orr to be a “legal adviser” to Atlantic City. The Detroit Free Pressdescribed the move as “a state
takeover similar to Gov. Rick Snyder’s state intervention in the Motor City.”

And this
spring, amid the hullabaloo of Republicans entering the 2016 presidential race,
Governor Snyder launched his own national tour to sell “the Michigan story to the rest of
the country.” His trip was funded by a nonprofit (fed, naturally, by
undisclosed donations) named “Making Government Accountable: The Michigan
Story.”

To many
Michiganders, this sounded as ridiculous as Jeb Bush launching a super PAC
dubbed “Making Iraq Free: The Bush Family Story.” Except Snyder wasn’t planning
to enter the presidential rat race. Instead, he was attempting to mainstream
Michigan’s form of austerity politics and its signature emergency management
legislation, which stripped more than half of the state’s
African-American residents of their local voting rights in 2013 and 2014.

As the
governor jaunted around the country, Ann Arbor-based photographer Eduardo
García and I decided to set out on what we thought of as our own two-week
Magical Michigan Tour. And while we weren’t driving a specially outfitted
psychedelic tour bus — we spent most of the trip in my grandmother’s 2005 Prius
— our journey was nevertheless remarkably surreal. From the southwest banks of
Lake Michigan to the eastern tips of the peninsula, we crisscrossed the state
visiting more than half a dozen cities to see if there was another side to the
governor’s story and whether Michigan really was, as one Detroit resident put
it, “a massive experiment in unraveling US democracy.”

Stop
One: Water Wars in Flint

Just as
we arrive, the march spills off the sidewalk in front of the city council
building.

“Stop
poisoning our children!” chants a little girl as the crowd tumbles down South
Saginaw Street, the city’s main drag. We’re in Flint, Michigan, a place that
hit the headlines last year for its brown, chemical-laced, possibly toxic
water. A wispy white-haired woman waves a gallon jug filled with
pee-colored liquid from her home tap. “They don’t care that they’re killing
us!” she cries.

We
catch up with Claire McClinton, the formidable if grandmotherly organizer of
the Flint Democracy Defense League, as we approach the roiling Flint River.
It’s been a longtime dumping ground for the Ford Motor Company’s riverfront
factories and, as of one year ago today, the only source of the city’s drinking
water. On April 25, 2014, on the instruction of the city’s emergency
manager, Flint stopped buying its supplies from the Detroit Water and Sewerage
Department and started drawing water directly from the river, which meant a
budgetary savings of $12 million a year. The downside: people
started getting sick.

Since
then, tests have detectedE. coli and
fecal bacteria in the water, as well as high levels of trihalomethanes,
a carcinogenic chemical cocktail known as THMs. For months, the city concealed
the presence of THMs, which over years can lead to increased rates of cancer,
kidney failure and birth defects. Still, it was obvious to local residents that
something was up. Some of them were breaking out in mysterious rashes or
experiencing bouts of severe diarrhea, while others watched as their eyelashes and hair began
to fall out.

As we
cross a small footbridge, McClinton recounts how the city council recently voted to “do all things necessary” to get
Detroit’s water back. The emergency manager, however, immediately overrode
their decision, terming it “incomprehensible.”

“This is
a whole different model of control,” she comments drily and explains that she’s
now working with other residents to file an injunction compelling the city to
return to the use of Detroit’s water. One problem, though: it has to be filed
in Ingham County, home to Lansing, the state capital, rather than in Flint’s
Genesee County, because the decision of a state-appointed emergency manager is
being challenged. “Under state rule, that’s where you go to redress
grievances,” she says. “Just another undermining of our local authority.”

In the
meantime, many city residents remain frustrated and confused. A few weeks
before the march, the city sent out two notices on the same day, packaged in
the same envelope. One, printed in black-and-white, stated bluntly: “Our water
system recently violated a drinking water standard.” The second, in flashy
color, had this cheery message: “We are pleased to report that City of Flint
water is safe and meets US Environmental Protection Agency guidelines… You can
be confident that the water provided to you today meets all safety standards.”
As one recipient of the notices commented, “I can only surmise that the point
was to confuse us all.”

McClinton
marches in silence for a few minutes as the crowd doubles back across the
bridge and begins the ascent up Saginaw Street. Suddenly, a man jumps onto a
life-size statue of a runner at the Riverfront Plaza and begins to cloak him in
one of the group’s T-shirts.

“Honey,
I don’t want you getting in any trouble!” his wife calls out to him.

He’s
struggling to pull a sleeve over one of the cast-iron arms when the droning weeoo-weeooo-weeoo of a police siren blares, causing a brief
frenzy until the man’s son realizes he’s mistakenly hit the siren feature on
the megaphone he’s carrying.

After a
few more tense moments, the crowd surges forward, leaving behind the statue,
legs stretched in mid-stride, arms raised triumphantly and on his chest a new
cotton T-shirt with the slogan: “Water You Fighting For?”

Stop
Two: The Tri-Cities of Cancer

The next
afternoon, we barrel down Interstate 75 into an industrial hellscape of smoke
stacks, flare offs and 18-wheelers, en route to another toxicity and
accountability crisis. This one was caused by a massive tar sands refinery and
dozens of other industrial polluters in southwest Detroit and neighboring River
Rouge and Ecorse, cities which lie along the banks of the Detroit River.

Already
with a slight headache from a haze of emissions, we meet photographer and
community leader Emma Lockridge and her neighbor Anthony Parker in front of
their homes, which sit right in the backyard of that tar sands refinery.

In 2006,
the toxicity levels in their neighborhood, known simply by its zip code as
“48217,” were 45 times higher than the state average. And
that was before Detroit gave $175 million in tax breaks to the billion-dollar Marathon
Petroleum Corporation to help it expand its refinery complex to process a surge
of high-sulfur tar sands from Alberta, Canada.

“We’re
a donor zip,” explains Lockridge as she settles into the driver’s seat of our
car. “We have all the industry and a tax base, but we get nothing back.”

We set
off on a whirlwind tour of their neighborhood, where schools have been torn
down and parks closed due to the toxicity of the soil, while so many residents
have died of cancer that it’s hard for their neighbors to keep track. “We used
to play on the swings here,” says Lockridge, pointing to a rusted yellow swing
set in a fenced-off lot where the soil has tested for high levels of lead,
arsenic and other poisonous chemicals. “Jumping right into the lead.”

As in
other regions of Michigan, people have been fleeing 48217 in droves. Here,
however, the depopulation results not from deindustrialization, but from
toxicity, thanks to an ever-expanding set of factories. These include a
wastewater treatment complex, salt mines, asphalt factories, cement plants, a
lime and stone foundry and a handful of steel mills all clustered in the
tri-cities region.

As
Lockridge and Parker explain, they have demanded that Marathon buy their homes.
They have also implored the state to cap emission levels and have filed
lawsuits against particularly toxic factories. In response, all they’ve seen
are more factories given more breaks, while the residents of 48217 get none.
Last spring, for example, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality
permitted the AK Steel plant, located close to the neighborhood, to increase its toxic emissions as much as 725 times. The approval, according to the Detroit Free Press, came after
“Gov. Rick Snyder’s business-promoting agency worked for months behind the
scenes” lobbying the Department of Environmental Quality.

“Look at
this cute little tree out of nowhere over here!” Lockridge exclaims, slowing
the car in front of a scrawny plant whose branches, in the midst of this
industrial wasteland, bend under the weight of white blossoms.

The
absurdity of life in such an environment is highlighted when we reach a
half-mile stretch of sidewalk sandwiched between a massive steel mill and a
coal-fired power plant that has been designated a “Wellness Walk.”

“Energize
your Life!” implores the sign affixed to a chain-link fence surrounding the
power plant. It’s an unlikely site for an exercise walk, given that the state’s
health officials consider this strip and the nearby
park “the epicenter of the state’s asthma burden.”

After a
sad laugh, we head for Zug Island, a Homeland Security-patrolled area populated
by what look to be giant black vacuum cleaners but are actually blast furnaces. The island was named for
millionaire Samuel Zug, who built a lavish mansion there only to discover that
it was sinking into swampland. It is now home to US Steel, the largest steel
manufacturer in the nation.

On our
way back, we make a final stop at Oakwood Heights, an almost entirely vacant
and partially razed subdivision located on the other side of the Marathon
plant. “This is the white area that was bought out,” says Lockridge. The scene
is eerie: small residential streets lined by grassy fields and the occasional
empty house. That Marathon paid residents to evacuate their homes in
this predominantly white section of town, while refusing to do the same in the
predominantly African-American 48217, which sits closer to the refinery,
strikes neither Lockridge and Parker nor their neighbors as a coincidence.

We
survey the remnants of the former neighborhood: bundles of ragged newspapers
someone was once supposed to deliver, a stuffed teddy bear abandoned on a
wooden porch and a childless triangle-shaped playground whose construction, a
sign reads, was “made possible by generous donations from Marathon.”

As this
particularly unmagical stop on our Michigan tour comes to an end, Parker says
quietly, “I’ve got to get my family out of here.”

Lockridge
agrees. “I just wish we had a refuge place we could go to while we’re
fighting,” she says. “You see we’re surrounded.”

Stop
Three: The Great White North

Not all
of Michigan’s problems are caused by emergency management, but this sweeping
new power does lie at the heart of many local controversies. Later that night
we meet with retired Detroit city worker, journalist and organizer Russ Bellant
who has made himself something of an expert on the subject.

In 2011,
he explains, Governor Snyder signed an emergency manager law known as Public
Act 4. The impact of this law and its predecessor, Public Act 72, was dramatic.
In the city of Pontiac, for instance, the number of public employees plummeted from 600 to 50. In Detroit, the
emergency manager of the school district waged a six-year slash-and-burn
campaign that, in the end, shuttered 95 schools. In Benton Harbor, the manager
effectively dissolved the city government, declaring: “The fact of the matter is, the
city manager is now gone. I am the city manager. I replace the financial
director, so I’m the financial director and the city manager. I am the mayor
and the commission. And I don’t need them.”

So in
2012, Bellant cancelled all his commitments in Detroit, packed his car full of
chocolate pudding snacks, canned juices and fliers and headed north to support
a statewide campaign to repeal the law through a ballot referendum in that
fall’s general election. For two months, he crisscrossed the upper reaches of
Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the part of the state that people say looks like a
hand, as well as the remote Upper Peninsula that borders Wisconsin and Canada.

“Seven
or eight hours a day, I would just knock on doors,” he says.

In
November, the efforts paid off and voters repealed the act, but the celebration
was short-lived. Less than two months later, during a lame-duck session of the
state legislature, Governor Snyder pushed through and signed Public Act 436, a
broader version of the legislation that was referendum-proof. Since then, financial
managers have continued to shut down fire departments, outsource police departments, sell off parking meters and public parks.
In Flint, the manager even auctioned off the plastic Santa Claus that once
adorned city hall, setting the initial bidding price at $5.

And
here’s one fact of life in Michigan: emergency management is normally only
imposed on majority-black cities. From 2013 to 2014, 52 percent of the
African-American residents in the state lived under emergency management,
compared to only 2 percent of white residents. And yet the repeal vote against
the previous version of the act was a demographic landslide: 75 out of 83 counties voted to nix the legislation, including
all of Michigan’s northern, overwhelmingly white, rural counties. “I think
people just internalized that P.A. 4 was undemocratic,” Bellant says.

That
next morning, we travel north to the city of Alpena, a 97 percent white lakeside town where Bellant knocked on
doors and the recall was triumphant. The farther north we head, the more the
landscape changes. We pass signs imploring residents to “Take Back America:
Liberty Yes, Tyranny No.” Gas stations feature clay figurines of hillbillies
drinking moonshine in bathtubs.

It’s
almost evening when we arrive. We spend part of our visit at the Dry Dock, a
dive bar overseen by a raspy-voiced bartender where all the political and
demographic divides of the state — and, in many ways, the country — are on full
display. Two masons are arguing about their union; the younger one likes the
protections it provides, while his colleague ditched the local because he
didn’t want to pay the dues. That move became possible only after Snyder signed controversial
“right-to-work” legislation in 2012, allowing workers to opt-out of union dues
and causing a sharp decline in union membership ever
since.

Above
their heads, the television screen projects intentionally terrifying images of
the uprising in Baltimore in response to the police murder of Freddie Gray, an
unarmed African-American man. “The Bloods, the Crips, and the Guerrillas are
out for the National Guard,” comments a carpenter about the unarmed protesters,
a sneer of distain in his voice. “Not that I like the f****** cops, either,” he
adds.

Throughout
our visit, people repeatedly told us that Alpena “isn’t Detroit or Flint” and
that they have absolutely no fear of the state seizing control of their sleepy,
white, touristy city. When we press the question with the owner of a bicycle
shop, the hostility rises in his voice as he explains: “Things just run the way
they should here” — by which he means, of course, that down in Detroit and
Flint, residents don’t run things the way they
should.

Yet,
misconceptions notwithstanding, the county voted to repeal Public Act 4 with a
staggering 63 percent of those who turned out opting to strike down the law.

Reflecting
Bellant’s feeling that locals grasped the law’s undemocratic nature in some
basic way, even if it would never affect them personally, one resident offered
this explanation: “When you think about living in a democracy, then this is
like financial martial law… I know they say these cities need help, but it
didn’t feel like something that would help.”

Stop
Four: The Fugitive Task Force

The next
day, as 2,000 soldiers from the 175th Infantry Regiment of the National Guard fanned out across Baltimore, we head for
Detroit’s west side where, only 24 hours earlier, a law enforcement officer
shot and killed a 20-year-old man in his living room.

A crowd
has already gathered near his house in the early summer heat, exchanging
condolences, waving signs and jostling for position as news crews set up
cameras and microphones for a press conference to come. Versions of what
happened quickly spread: Terrance Kellom was fatally shot when officers swarmed
his house to deliver an arrest warrant. The authorities claim that he grabbed a
hammer, prompting the shooting; his father, Kevin, contends Terrance was
unarmed and kneeling in front of him when he was shot several times, including
once in the back.

Kellom
is just one of the 489 people killed in 2015 in the United
States by law enforcement officers. There is, however, a disturbing twist to
Kellom’s case. He was not, in fact, killed by the police but by a federal agent
working with a little known multi-jurisdictional interagency task force coordinated
by the US Marshals.

Similar
task forces are deployed across the country and they all share the same sordid
history: the Marshals have been hunting people ever since the 1850 Fugitive
Slave Act compelled the agency to capture slaves
fleeing north for freedom. One 19th-century newspaper account, celebrating the
use of bloodhounds in such hunts, wrote: “The Cuban dog would frequently pull
down his game and tear the runaway to pieces before the officers could come
up.”

These
days, Detroit’s task force has grown particularly active as budget cuts have
decimated the local police department. Made up of federal Immigration and
Customs officers, police from half a dozen local departments and even employees
of the Social Security Administration office, the Detroit Fugitive Apprehension
Team has nabbed more than 15,000 people. Arrest rates have soared
since 2012, the same year the local police budget was chopped by 20 percent.
Even beyond the task force, the number of federal agents patrolling the city
has risen as well. The Border Patrol, for example, has increased its presence
in the region by tenfold over the last decade and just two
weeks ago announced the launch of a new $14 million Detroit station.

Kevin
Kellom approaches the barricade of microphones and begins speaking so quietly
that the gathered newscasters crush into each other in an effort to catch
what’s he’s saying. “They assassinated my son,” he whispers. “I want justice
and I’m going to get justice.”

Yet
today, six weeks after Terrance’s death, no charges have been brought against
the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fired the fatal shot. Other
law enforcement officers who have killed Michigan residents in recent years
have similarly escaped punishment. Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley was
videotaped killing seven-year-old Aiyana Jones with a
submachine gun during a SWAT team raid on her home in 2010. He remains a member
of the department. Ann Arbor police officer David Reid is also back on duty after fatally shooting
40-year-old artist and mother Aura Rosser in November 2014. The Ann Arbor
police department ruled that a “justifiable homicide” because Rosser was
holding a small kitchen knife during the encounter — a
ruling that Rosser’s family members and city residents are contesting with an
ongoing campaign calling for an independent investigation into her death.

And
such deadly incidents continue. Since Kellom’s death, law enforcement officers
have fatally shot at least three more Michigan residents — one outside the city of Kalamazoo, another near Lansing, and a third in Battle Creek.

Stop
Five: The Unprofitable All-Charter School District

Our
final stop is Muskegon Heights, a small city on the banks of Lake Michigan,
home to perhaps the most spectacular educational debacle in recent history.
Here’s the SparkNotes version. In 2012, members of the Muskegon Heights public
school board were given two options: dissolve the district entirely or succumb
to an emergency manager’s rule. On arrival, the manager announced that he was
dissolving the public school district and forming a new system to be run by the
New York-based for-profit charter school management company Mosaica Education.
Two years later, that company broke its five-year contract and fled because, according to the emergency manager, “the
profit just simply wasn’t there.”

And
here’s a grim footnote to this saga: in 2012, in preparation for the new
charter school district, cryptically named the Muskegon Heights Public School
Academy System, the emergency manager laid off every single school employee.

“We knew
it was coming,” explained one of the city’s longtime elementary school
teachers. She asked not to be identified, so I’ll call her Susan. “We received
letters in the mail.”

Then,
around 1 a.m. the night before the new charter school district was slated to
open, she received a voicemail asking if she could teach the following morning.
She agreed, arriving at Martin Luther King Elementary School for what would be
the worst year in her more than two-decade career.

When we
visit that school, a single-story brick building on the east side of town, the
glass of the front door had been smashed and the halls were empty, save for two
people removing air conditioning units. But in the fall of 2012, when Susan was
summoned, Martin Luther King was still filled with students — and chaos.
Schedules were in disarray. Student computers were broken. There were supply
shortages of just about everything, even rolls of toilet paper. The district’s
already barebones special education program had been further gutted. The “new,” non-unionized
teaching staff — about 10 percent of whom initially did not
have valid teaching certificates — were overwhelmingly young, inexperienced and
white. (Approximately 75 percent of the town’s residents are African-American.)

With
her salary slashed to less than $30,000, she picked up a second job at a nearby
after-school program. Her health faltered. Instructed by the new administration
never to sit down during class, a back condition worsened until surgery was
required. The stress began to affect her short-term memory. Finally, in the
spring, Susan sought medical leave and never came back.

She was
part of a mass exodus. Advocates say that more than half the teachers were
either fired, quit, or took medical leave before the 2012-2013 school year
ended. Mosaica itself wasn’t far behind, breaking its contract at the end of
the 2014 school year. The emergency manager said he understood the company’s
financial assessment, comparing the school system to “a broke-down car.” That spring, Governor
Snyder visited and called the district “a work in
progress.”

Across
the state, the education trend has been toward privatization and increased control over local districts by
the governor’s office, with results that are, to say the least, underwhelming.
This spring, a report from The Education Trust, an independent national
education nonprofit, warned that the state’s system had gone
“from bad to worse.”

“We’re
now on track to perform lower than the nation’s lowest-performing states,” the
report’s author, Amber Arellano, told the local news.

Later
that afternoon, we visited the city’s James Jackson Museum of African-American
History, where we sat with Dr. James Jackson, a family physician and longtime
advocate of community-controlled public education in the city.

He
explains that the city’s now-failing struggle for local control and quality
education is part of a significantly longer history. Most of the town’s
families originally arrived here in the first half of the 20th century from the
Jim Crow South, where public schools for Black students were not only abysmally
underfunded, but also thwarted by censorship and outside governance, as
historian Carter Goodwin Woodson explained in his groundbreaking 1933 study, The Mis-Education of the Negro.
Well into the 20th century, for example, the Declaration of Independence and
the US Constitution were barred from grade-school textbooks for being too
aspirational. “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about
his actions,” Woodson wrote back then.

More
than eight decades later, Dr. Jackson offered similar thoughts about the
Muskegon Heights takeover as he led us through the museum, his bright yellow
T-shirt reminding us to “Honor Black History Every Day 24/7 — 365.”

“We have
to control our own education,” Jackson said, as we passed sepia newspaper
clippings of civil rights marches and an 1825 bill of sale for Peggy and her
son Jonathan, purchased for $371 by James Aiken of Warren County, Georgia.
“Until we control our own school system, we can’t be properly educated.”

As we
leave, we stop a moment to take in an electronic sign hanging in the museum’s
window that, between announcements about upcoming book club meetings and the
establishment’s hours, flashed this refrain in red letters:

The
education ofMuskegon HeightsBelongs to the PeopleNot the governor

The
following day, we finally arrived back in Detroit, our notebooks and iPhone
audio records and camera memory cards filled to the brim, heads spinning from
everything we had seen, our aging Prius-turned-tour-bus in serious need of an
oil change.

While we
had been bumping along on our Magical Michigan Tour, the national landscape
had, in some ways, grown even more surreal. Bernie Sanders, the independent
socialist senator from Vermont, announced that he was challenging Hillary
Clinton for the Democratic ticket. Detroit neuroscientist Dr. Ben Carson —
famous for declaring that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened in
this nation since slavery” — entered the Republican circus. And amid the
turmoil, Governor Snyder’s style continued to attract attention, including from
the editors of Bloomberg View, who touted his experience with “urban
revitalization,” concluding: “His brand of politics deserves a wider audience.”

So
buckle your seat belts and watch out. In some “revitalized” Bloombergian
future, you, too, could flee your school district like the students and teachers
of Muskegon Heights, or drink contaminated water under the mandate of a
state-appointed manager like the residents of Flint, or be guaranteed toxic
fumes to breathe like the neighbors of 48217, or get shot like Terrance Kellom
by federal agents in your own living room. All you have to do is let Rick
Snyder’s yellow submarine cruise into your neighborhood.” (2)

These five ‘vignettes’, are snapshots if you will, of
contemporary life in what was once the industrial heartland of America. A compelling portrait of how deep runs the
rot. Once a Mecca for millions of
Southern Whites, Blacks, Latinos and others in their quest to get a purchase on
the middle class Michigan has become, in the hands of men like John Engler and
Rick Snyder, a ‘hollowed out’ dumping ground (3), with rapidly deteriorating
standards of living, tax base, education and infrastructure where truly the
conservative ideal has become the community’s nightmare; a ‘Bell Weather’ example
of where the American Dream goes to die.

In my early 50’s I left the state of Michigan for points
south in search of employment, a journey with mixed results, for I had learned
early in life that what happens to me happens to my community, what happens to
my community happens to my state, and what happens to my state happens to my
country.Indeed Snyder and his fellow
Rescumlicans, waving flags of ‘freedom’, have a cruise waiting for you.

-------

(1)See March 23, 2015: Malignancy of Swine, Turning of the Screws, Marrow of
the Republic

(3)Former
Michigan Governor John Engler is best remembered for allowing Canada to use
Michigan as a dumping ground, importing waste from Ontario.It was under his administration that the
State began to go ‘south’, transforming Michigan into the Louisiana if not the
Mississippi of the midwest.

Jun 25, 2015

Sam Becker, writing in an article published online,
has given us a few of the emerging statistics cataloguing the decline of
America’s Middle Class and, perhaps, the United States itself.In an article entitled “5 States Where the Middle Class Is Being Destroyed”, Becker cites
a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts published through its Stateline blog.The study found that the middle class has,
between 2000 and 2013, shrunk in every single state concluding “that there was
truly nowhere to hide from the economic downturn that began in late 2008.” Additionally,
the “fall in middle class ranks was also accompanied by drops in median income
in most states as well” (1)

Measuring the “Middle Class” as being those households
making “between 67% and 200% of the state’s median income” Becker reports that
Nevada and Vermont lost 5% of its middle class; with North Dakota 5.1% and Ohio
reporting a 5.2% decline of the middle class as a percentage of their
populations.The state hardest hit was
Wisconsin losing 5.7% of its middle class, where median income had dropped by
$9000.00 annually.Nevada had been hit hard by mortgage
foreclosures and the collapse of the real estate market; Vermont’s woes are
attributed to the number of senior citizens that make up the population and
their reliance on fixed incomes.The oil
boom in North Dakota has fueled inflation and the prosperity, such as it is,
has not been shared.In Ohio, the exporting
of good paying manufacturing jobs has devastated the middle class with adjusted
median incomes (adjusted for inflation) falling from $56,400 in 2000 to “only
$48,000” by 2013. (1).
In the ‘race to the bottom, Wisconsin, however, was
our clear winner, losing 5.7% of its standing in the population and roughly
$9,000.00 in annual household purchasing power.The state’s response has been to ‘gut’ the unions and further erode wage
and living standards portending a long recovery or, perhaps, no possible
recovery at all.

The causes are many and varied and decades in the
making. To be sure the country has been
hit unevenly, as is always the case during any upheaval. Normally change brings with it a mixed result
featuring pockets of prosperity and despair.What has characterized this recession is the near universal experience
now threatening the very existence of America’s middle class, portending not
only a decline in purchasing power but in political power as well.Nevada has seen its middle class decline from
a majority of 53.6, to a minority of 48.8% of the population.Vermont likewise has a minority Middle Class
with 47.4% of the population, now so numbered.North Dakota too now numbers its Middle Class in the minority at
47.5.None of these developments are
healthy for either the economy or the republic.

I have discussed, in these columns, the importance of
a strong, vibrant, and all-encompassing middle class.(2)A republic cannot function without such a
Middle Class.A Middle Class is a
prerequisite for the very creation of a republic, the very foundation upon
which it stands. Without it the “republic”
will either fail to come into being or it will degenerate into either an
Oligopoly or a military dictatorship; a mere “Banana Republic”, a hollow
mockery, a cruel hoax.The Middle Class
is under assault and so, by extension, is the foundation of the very republic
itself.
________
(1). http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/5-states-where-the-middle-class-is-being-bulldozed.html/?a=viewall

Jun 24, 2015

“No one - no
matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from
some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this
country of ours.”

---Senator Robert F. Kennedy April 5, 1968

It’s the
same old story, another tragedy involving guns in America, this time with a
hefty dose of overt racism.Last week a
deranged little punk sat in a prayer meeting in a black church in Charleston
South Carolina.As the meeting was
drawing to a close, he stood up, pulled out a revolver and shot and killed 9
people, including the pastor and state legislator. The NRA, with its usual
knee-jerk justifications said through a spokesman that the fault lay with the
dead pastor and legislator who voted against allowing citizens to carry guns in
public places, including church services.

The young
man said he wanted to kill some black people and start a revolution.What he started was a revulsion in which the
country recoiled at yet another senseless act of violence; in this instance a
racial hate crime.In the aftermath,
calls have gone out to take down the confederate flag from public buildings, a
reaction I’m sure the psychopath had not anticipated.Not only the Southern Law Center, but the
Republican Governor of South Carolina and the Republican Speaker of the
Mississippi House of Representatives have called for the removal of what has
become a symbol of hatred, racism, and oppression.

I’ve been
following developments as they take their usual course.Faux News, pandering as usual to the unwashed
and the racists in this country has accused liberals of using the tragedy to
further an agenda, some denying that the crime was racially motivated.While Mitt Romney has called for the removal
of the ‘stars and bars’ others, including most of the candidates for president
in the Republican field, have moved to defend the symbol of racism. Still
others have chosen to remain, for the time being, silent.

On the
internet one encounters the usual palaver regarding the use of the old
confederate standard.Here is one such
post:

“You
liberals just look for people's lives to mess up don't you? Why not let
everyone live how they want too and accept us southerners and our passion our
our heritage? This is so heartbreaking and a is a blatant attack on one group
of people because of their beliefs. Why can't you just let us live in peace”.

To which I
replied:

“To be against the slave
republic is not liberal or conservative. These swine have been the only people
to mount an armed rebellion against the republic of the United States in our
entire history and as such should have been tried as traitors not 'honored' as
patriots. In fact, if you study the lead up to the civil war you will discover
that it was largely through gerrymandering that states like Virginia and North
Carolina seceded from the Union. The residents in the mountain regions of
Virginia in fact seceded from the state in outrage over the rigging of the vote
to secede. Every state in the confederacy had a military contingent in the
union army except South Carolina. Instead of celebrating the morally
indefensible 'heritage' you claim, admit defeat. You lost, it was in all the
papers, get over it.”

Not content
to leave it there, he issued a summary clarification:

“Joseph, I take it that you
have not read the Confederate constitution. They outright prohibited foreign
slave trade in an attempt to lower the enslaved population (eventually to
zero). The war was not over slavery. Abraham Lincoln said it himself when he
was interviewed in a newspaper article, simply saying, "If I could have
preserved the union and freed all the slaves, I would have done it. If I could
have preserved the union and freed some and left others alone, I would have
done it. If I could have preserved the union without freeing one single slave,
then I would have done it."

The war for the north was about preserving the union, and the war for the south
was about protecting their states from an overly powerful government.

Also, the Confederacy did not invade the United states. It was not an armed
rebellion, but a peaceful session until the union invaded the Confederacy.

And may I remind you that the only flag that flew over slave ships as they were
imported to America was the American flag. America itself was the "slave
republic" and somehow gets away with it. I still love America and honor
both sides who died in thar war. I love the history and I love where my
heritage came from. What about the black people now who are protesting across
the country and flying the Panafrican flag, a country who still practices
slavery?”

To which I responded:

“There is no doubt that the war was
about slavery. Why else did the south secede? It was because the country elected
a president committed to preventing the spread of the 'peculiar' institution
into the newly acquired territories taken from Mexico. In fact both Lincoln and
Alexander Stevens (vice-president of the confederacy) opposed Polk's war
precisely because they feared that conflict over the issue of slavery as it
pertained to any newly acquired territories would threaten the 'balance' of
slave vs free states and tear the union apart. The fact is that the South, when
confronted with election returns that they didn't agree with chose to revolt.

It was Steven Douglas' idea of 'popular sovereignty’
that is opening up the question of whether a state would be free or a slave
state that rekindled the conflict and brought Lincoln back into politics.

I have read the confederate constitution and
there is no provisions in it for, as you suggest, lowering the slave
population. Limiting or ending the slave trade was a fait accompli by 1860 since the British, headed by Wilberforce, had
outlawed the trade, as had the United States by that time. There were about 4
million enslaved in the U.S. in 1860, more than enough to sustain population
growth. In addition more money was invested in slaves than all the industry,
banking, and railroads of the north. To suggest a speedy end to slavery under a
regime established and committed to the institution is defy both history and
logic.

Lastly, I would suggest you read the works of
John C. Calhoun and his leadership during the 'nullification' crisis of 1832.
The conflict was long in the making, threats of nullification and secession
longstanding, and finally came to a head when the south was presented with an
electoral outcome that threatened their 'peculiar' institution.” (1)

I left it to others to point out that ‘Panafrican’ is not a
country and has no national flag, it is a twentieth century political movement
attempting to unite the continent much as the European Union is working to
unite Europe but with less success.

My point here is that in nearly every political discourse
one confronts a version of ‘revisionism’, in this case that the civil war was
about anything other than slavery and that somehow the slave system was either ‘on
its way out’ or somehow benign.None of
these points are valid.

To be against the display of the old ‘stars and bars’ is neither
liberal nor conservative; it is, simply, patriotic.To oppose the symbol of the only armed
rebellion against the duly constituted authority of this government is
patriotism by definition.In fact a true
‘conservative’—defender of established institutions-- would abhor the very
thought of armed insurrection.